The painting is by Albert Bierstadt, perhaps the best known landscape painter of the Old West. He idealized the West, painting majestic mountains and glimmering golden sunsets. He painted this one 150 years ago. Ten years later the great herds had almost disappeared because of the intrusion of settlers, the railroad, and the buffalo hunters who killed hundreds a day for their hides, leaving the carcasses to rot on the plains.
This was also the end of an era for the Native American tribes like the Sioux and the Cheyenne who depended on the great herds for almost everything.

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